This blog began in 2007, focusing on anthrax vaccine, and later expanded to other public health and political issues. The blog links to media reports, medical literature, official documents and other materials.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

In that same panel on vaccines, another panelist alleged that vaccines are a low-margin product and a low profit industry. It was said that many companies left the market.That was true once. This is now. There are few companies due to tremendous market consolidation in pharmaceutical companies overall. Prices of vaccines have gone crazy. Almost all new vaccines in the US cost over $100 per dose. The rise of third-party payers (mostly the federal government) made this possible.From the Atlantic, regarding changes to the industry:

... But then a couple things happened to turn the vaccine market around in recent years. Global demand, particularly in developing countries, shot up. Since 2000,the Gavi Alliance has provided vaccination for 500 million children in poor countries, preventing an estimated 7 million deaths. GlaxoSmithKline reportedthat 80 percent of the vaccine doses they manufactured in 2013 went to developing countries. Additionally, vaccines that could turn a profit in high-income countries—constituting 82 percent of global vaccine sales in terms of value, according to the World Health Organization—hit the market.

"I think the market opened up once Hepatitis B vaccine showed that you can really sustain very high prices for single dose. That was unheard of back in the 1980s," says David Bishai, director of the Interdepartmental Health Economics Program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

While vaccine prices have always been higher in the U.S. and Europe due to tiered pricing, prices have been rising dramatically in recent years. The government's Vaccine for Children Program purchases vaccines for about 50 percent of children in the U.S. The current CDC pediatric-contract price for MMR is $19.91, while the private-sector pediatric price for MMR has risen to $59.91. [Merck scientists have alleged Merck faked data on the mumps component of MMR to make it appear more effective than it is--Nass.]

In the U.S., Merck is the only company licensed to offer the measles vaccine. In their recent 2014 earnings report, they reported that sales of ProdQuad (a vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella), MMR II (for measles, mumps, rubella), and Varivax (a chicken pox vaccine) together came in at $1.4 billion, a fraction of the company's $42.2 billion in global sales. Their top selling vaccine is Gardasil, an HPV vaccine, which brings in $1.7 billion in sales...

After swimming with dolphins at Key Largo, they checked me out at the edge of the pool

Visiting a Bhutanese Dzong, the regional seat of both government and religion (and a fort for good measure)

Why am I blogging?

Because life is meant to be lived! The left side of this blog has photos of some peak experiences. And the right side contains information about which I am passionate.

Too many peoples' lives are characterized by lack of authenticity, and fear of acknowledging and expressing their true nature. Employees cannot say what they think at work, and in the corporate system we must squish ourselves into square holes when we are round pegs. We thus lose touch with our souls, becoming cogs in a soulless, profit-driven machine.

The culture of political correctness has meant, in medicine, that we ignore how the foundations of our science are being undermined by commercialism. Clinical data generated or presented by the manufacturers of drugs, vaccines and devices cannot be trusted: there are hundreds of studies proving this. But this fraudulent information continues to be the only data informing the approval of vaccines, drugs and devices.

Unless scrupulous ethical conduct is demanded of physicians and biological scientists, our lack of meaningful standards will carry the medical-pharmaceutical system down the path of increasing irrelevance.

Medicine and its tools need to be affordable. The current medical-industrial milieu, characterized by contempt for science, countless ways for insiders to achieve wealth due to failure of good governance, and regulatory agency-to-industry revolving doors, has ushered in stratospheric pricing... further kicking us down that path to irrelevance.

Why is our new health care plan a giveaway to health industries instead of to health consumers? Why won't it cover all Americans? Why was the "public option" never an option for the Obama administration? Why did the promised Trump health plan evaporate the moment he was elected?

So many of our leaders carry a heavy burden of mendacity and avarice. If they instead got in touch with their own souls (perhaps by exposure to the natural world), or made their decisions by maximizing the amount of good that results, our leaders might find real meaning and value in their lives.

Until that happens, the only way to straighten out the current mess is to demand accountability and impose penalties on unethical/dishonest leaders. Both political parties enjoy bounteous hors d'oeuvres from Pharma's table, making it unlikely the existing political "process" will provide relief--as we've seen in the demoralizing healthcare reform drama.

Until then, I'll continue to "call it as I see it" in this blog -- working and living the way life should be, in rural Maine, far from the centers of power.

Ellen Byrne has created several designs encapsulating aspects of the FBI's ridiculous case against Bruce Ivins. They can be purchased on T-shirts and coffee mugs. All proceeds will be donated to the the Frederick County chapter of the American Red Cross, a favored charity of Dr. Bruce Ivins.